No flimping
Advance disclaimer: I am not a linguist, have never studied
linguistics, and am sure to get some of the details wrong in this
article. Caveat lector.

There is a standard example in linguistics that is attached to the
word "flimp". The idea it labels is that certain grammatical
operations are restricted in the way they behave, and cannot reach
deeply into grammatical structures and rearrange them.

For instance, you can ask "What did you use to see the girl on the
hill in the blue dress?" and I can reply "I used a telescope to see
the girl on the hill in the blue dress". Here "the girl on the hill
in the blue dress" is operating as a single component, which
could, in principle, be arbitrarily long. ("The girl on the hill that
was fought over in the war between the two countries that have been at
war since the time your mother saw that monkey climb the steeple of
the church...") This component can be extracted whole from one
sentence and made the object of a new sentence, or the subject of some
other sentence.

But certain other structures are not transportable. For example, in
"Bill left all his money to Fred and someone", one can reach down as
far as "Fred and someone" and ask "What did Bill leave to Fred and
someone?" but one cannot reach all the way down to "someone" and ask
"Who did Bill leave all his money to Fred and"?

Under certain linguistic theories of syntax, analogous constraints
rule out the existence of certain words. "Flimped" is the
hypothetical nonexistent word which, under these theories, cannot
exist. To flimp is to kiss a girl who is allergic to. For example,
to flimp coconuts is to kiss a girl who is allergic to coconuts. (The
grammatical failure in the last sentence but one illustrates the
syntactic problem that supposedly rules out the word "flimped".

I am not making this up; for more details (from someone who, unlike
me, may know what he is talking about) See Word meaning and
Montague grammar by David Dowty, p. 236. Dowty cites the
earlier sources, from 1969–1973 who proposed this theory in the
first place. The "flimped" example above is exactly the same as
Dowty's, and I believe it is the standard one.

Dowty provides a similar, but different example: there is not, and
under this theory there cannot be, a verb "to thork" which means "to
lend your uncle and", so that "John thorked Harry ten dollars" would
mean "John lent his uncle and Harry ten dollars".

I had these examples knocking around in my head for many years. I
used to work for the University of Pennsylvania Computer and
Information Sciences department, and from my frequent contacts with
various cognitive-science types I acquired a lot of odds and ends of
linguistic and computational folklore. Michael Niv told me this one
sometime around 1992.

The "flimp" thing rattled around my head, surfacing every few months
or so, until last week, when I thought of a counterexample: Wank.

The verb "to wank to" means "to rub one's genitals while considering",
and so seems to provide a countexample to the theory that says that
verbs of this type are illegal in English.

When I went to investigate, I found that the theory had pretty much
been refuted anyway. The Dowty
book (published 1979) produced another example: "to cuckold" is
"to have sexual intercourse with the woman who is married to".

Some Reddit person recently complained that one of my blog posts had
no point. Eat this, Reddit person.